About BestPOSApp

Our first experience with POS software

The restaurant startup agency we consulted introduced us to SambaPOS5, and they also connected us with an agent who came all the way from Port Harcourt to Lagos to help set it up. We lodged him in a hotel and got everything configured. Then we started using it.

It didn't take years to identify what we wanted to do differently. After just a couple of weeks, we had already experienced enough of the operational friction to start thinking:

Not because we believed existing POS software had no value. It was because our own requirements were becoming very clear. We wanted something that fitted the way we actually worked. And because we could build it ourselves, we decided to try.

The problem wasn't just selling.

One of the frustrations was the work-period workflow. With our setup, we had to physically be there to start and end a work period. That might sound minor until you're the person responsible for doing it.

Sometimes you don't arrive exactly when the business opens. Sometimes you don't make it in the morning. And sometimes, because life and business don't always follow a perfect schedule, you might not even get there for another day or two.

So BestPOSApp took a different approach. Instead of requiring someone to be physically present to open and close a work period, you can specify the actual start and end times and generate the corresponding work-period report. And because the information is accessible from the web, you don't have to wait until you're standing in front of the POS terminal—or print a report just to know what happened.

Then there was the software itself.

Our experience also exposed another category of friction. The POS environment we were using came with desktop software, a Microsoft SQL database, and dependencies such as Visual C++. Startup could be slow, and occasionally the application would crash. On some occasions, we had to deal with database connection configuration again before everything would work properly.

None of these problems individually made the software unusable. But together, they reinforced something important:

We wanted the POS itself to get out of the way.

That became one of the principles behind BestPOSApp. We weren't trying to build the most complicated POS system possible. We wanted one that was quick to understand, easy to operate, and dependable in the situations a real business encounters every day.

So we built BestPOSApp.

What started as a solution to our own frustrations became something much bigger. We built BestPOSApp around the things we wished our previous system did differently:

What happens when the internet goes away?

For a POS system, “offline support” shouldn't mean you can just look at the software. A business should still be able to sell.

BestPOSApp supports continuous sales even when the internet connection disappears. A cashier can continue processing orders, receipts can still be printed, and inventory deductions continue against locally cached stock quantities. When the connection returns, transactions synchronize with the server seamlessly.

So an unstable internet connection doesn't have to mean: “Stop selling.”

One account. Different kinds of business.

Nurturity Plaza helped shape one of the most important ideas behind BestPOSApp. The restaurant, gym, and music studio don't operate in exactly the same way. So why should the software force them to?

Inside a BestPOSApp account, different operations can be organized into Departments, also referred to as Branches. For example, our own setup includes:

Each department can have the products and/or services relevant to it. A department doesn't have to be only a shop. It can sell products, offer services, handle subscriptions, or do all of them together. That flexibility wasn't invented in a conference room. We needed it ourselves.

A POS that understands subscriptions

A gym isn't simply a shop where someone buys something once. People subscribe, attend, leave, and renew. BestPOSApp treats those activities as part of the business rather than forcing them into a conventional product-sale workflow.

Members with active subscriptions can clock in and out, making attendance tracking part of the ecosystem. Receipts and staff ID cards can carry scannable QR codes for quick recognition. The same platform connects subscription → membership → attendance → sales without requiring separate systems.

Let customers order like a cashier would.

Sometimes the best way to speed up ordering is to let the customer do it themselves. With BestPOSApp, restaurant customers can access the menu from their phones, select what they want, and place an order directly. The order appears at the restaurant for staff to review, modify, and complete.

Payment can be configured around your preferred workflow. Connect your payment merchant details through UnifiedPurse (supporting Flutterwave, Paystack, etc.), or configure your own account details for direct transfers. The customer becomes the first point of entry for the order.

Profit should look like business profit.

₦1 million in sales doesn't tell you what the business actually made. BestPOSApp goes beyond simple sales totals. Our business-performance calculations account for cost of goods, discounts, taxes, wastages, ledger expenses, and other recorded business expenses.

The result is a more useful picture of performance for the selected period. Because knowing your sales is useful, but knowing what those sales actually mean is better.

Taxes shouldn't require guesswork either.

Different parts of a business may not need the same tax treatment. BestPOSApp allows tax rates to be configured according to your requirements at the general business level, the department level, or the specific product category level. This makes tax computation part of the selling workflow rather than manual reconstruction.